Democracies Of The East: A Study In Comparative Politics

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Dr. Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968) was one of the greatest social scientists of India. He was Professor of Economics and Sociology at Lucknow University and later on Vice-Chancellor at the same University. He played an important and constructive role in country's freedom struggle. He was invited to deliver lectures at many Indian universities and also abroad including U.K., Europe, U.S.A and U.S.S.R He was a Highly original philosopher of history, a penetrating interpreter of civilization and a gifted art theorist. He wrote more than 50 books. covering these and other subjects. He held important positions in some national and international bodies. An American reviewer has considered him to have written "some of the most important works of our century"

Prof. G.R. Madan (b. 1923) M.A. (Econ. & Socio.), Dip. In Com., LLB, Ph.D. had been teaching in the Department of Sociology and Social work, University of Lucknow till his retirement in 1984 A widely traveled Person Prof Madan had the privilege of working with distinguished sociologists like Prof. Radhakamal Mukerjee, Harold F Kaufman and S.L. Andreski at J.K Institute of Sociology, and Human Relations, University of Lucknow, Social Science Research Centre, Mississipi State University (USA) and University of Reading (UK) respectively Presently he is a visiting Professor of Sociology in Maharaja Surajmal Institute, New Delhi.

A very vital factor in modern politics is the increasing recognition of the value of group allegiance. The nineteenth century has been an era of the expansion of the great European States, which could only have been possible as a result of an all-comprehensive centralisation. This was, therefore, the age of liberalism, in which the dogma of political sovereignty was elaborated internally and externally, and the concepts of order and progress analysed. It was also an age of the elite and the expert in government, which showed the world the advantages of centralised large-scale service. But the nineteenth-century politics also preached ideals of liberty and inaugurated liberal measures of education. These have borne fruit, and there is now witnessed a world-wide attempt to orient man's political life to larger and wider human values, and to organise the social community beyond the purely national State. This movement has been accelerated by the growing perception of the difficulty of articulating the attitude of the labouring classes in a polity whose framework was built by the propertied classes. From the colonies have also come the demand for autonomy, which alone could suit the regional and local peculiarities that could no longer be ignored. Thus there has been a demand for the adaptation of the forms of government to particular regions. Again, the war and the new international conscience which it has helped to evoke, have shown the moral limitations of a purely national territorial State, though one of the phases of the war was the struggle to complete the nationalistic movement, resulting in the establishment of independent communities both in Europe and Asia, on the one hand, and, on the other, the closer welding together of self- governing colonies within a larger commonwealth. The State, newly conscious of its higher life and values, seeks to merge itself in the super-personal organism of Humanity, which now strives for expression in the League of Nations. With a free delegation of important powers and responsibilities to international bodies and commissions, the pre-eminence of the State ceases to be unique, and sovereignty becomes" composite" and" multiple." With the emergence of the idea of international solidarity the doctrine of the State as the very basis of social order and the ultimate expression of social cohesion recedes into the background. Meanwhile the economic life has developed a conflict of interests in different classes, which, as socialism has insisted, can no longer be mingled together by a facile doctrine of the unity of social purpose as embodied in the sovereign State. In political philosophy discussions thus no longer centre round the distinction between sovereign and subject, the limits of sovereignty, and the conditions of public law and order, but round the relations of the State not merely towards other social groups and interests, but also towards the Community of States, or, again, round the nature of social purposes and human values, in which the State lives and moves. The old controversy between rights and duties, law and liberty, which is another version of the Individual and the State as fixed and antithetical concepts, is now resolved in the emphasis on their mutual interaction, and on the vital process of association, which, indeed, makes the State and remakes the Individual. A group theory of rights, and a social conception of public law emerge, and we find a definite revision of the older theories of sovereignty in the doctrine of the Pluralistic State.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages